Who was Sinclair Beiles?

Sunday, August 2, 2015

When your voice
Sounds of dark avenues
And parks
Breathing with mysterious hoodlums
When the last rattling tram
Has frozen
And hangs in icicles from the eaves
When your heart no longer stands
On a street corner
With feverish eyes
Stamping its boots
When the traffic lights have stopped
And you are through with calculating
Forgetting your train journeys
And timetables
Come to me
With your switchblade knife.
We'll climb the spire of the town hall
Together
And carve our names on the moon!

Sunday, July 26, 2015

in the flower market
at night
beside the church
with its glowing ornaments
beneath the windowsill
on which she leans
staring at the twinkling city
when the dustbins are rattled
by marauding cats
when the shoes of the last lover
beat like drums
and suddenly a chorus of drunken singers
lights up the street
the exiles gather silently
to examine their wounds
and to plan for their departure...

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Everything blue
Blue nuns
With hats like paper boats.
A boys' choir with open mouths
Like young birds wanting to be fed.
There's an old policeman
On a bicycle
And a girl shaking a rug
From a window
With a wisp of hair like a tendril
Hanging in front of her ear.
And there's also a woman wearing black stockings.

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Happy
This exile.
In unfamiliar streets
Canaries sing
And women smile from their doorways
At the stranger
Who carries his heart
In his hand.
He walks about the marketplace
As if risen from the dead
An ancestor
Come to see his people
Trading old coins
Stamped with his likeness.

Ari lives with her mother
Spends Sundays with her lover
Under the pine trees on Lycabettus hill
While the church bells ring for mass in the valley.
Ari wears an engagement ring although she is not engaged
And dreams of meeting an American
Who will take her to New York
And so she sits at tourist cafés during the lunch hour

Wondering whether she can still have children
After that abortion in Piraeus.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

the tide runs out
and gangsters strut along the beach
while fighter jets roar overhead
in towns where tyranny clicks its heels
free men are exiled to the rainy squares
- screams like cattle waiting to be slaughtered -
rifle fire drowns out retreating music
and on the promenades where lovers used to meet
soldiers with savage eyes mount the machine guns.
men whose dreams were smashed by blaring radios
stare from cafes with frightened eyes
and flags flap like vicious whips
as dark curtained limousines
speed through the murdered streets.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Many things happen on street corners.
Lovers part with a kiss
Salesmen smooth down their hair
And straighten their ties
Cloth manufacturers stare
At the hair on the napes
Of schoolteachers' necks
Blind musicians play accordions
Little boys hand out yellow leaflets
Shop assistants straighten their green skirts
And old dogs on leashes relax and take a piss.
Oh my heart!

Saturday, April 25, 2015

In 1975 Sinclair Beiles gave an interview to Michael
Butterworth, shortly after he had completed a lengthy in-patient treatment for
mental disturbance at Bowden House.

The conversation allowed Beiles to speak about his
illness and treatment:

“Conditions inside an asylum [being] ideal for a poet,
because of the lack of personal responsibility living in the clinic. Somebody
would arrive with a tray for my breakfast…and take it away again. Somebody
would come and make my bed. I felt I was in a very congenial environment. The
people were responsive to poetry – sometimes out of boredom, sometimes out of
their own madness.”

Asked, “How do you cope outside, then?” Beiles responds:

“Well, I cope with difficulty. All sorts of things like
washing, and all the chores of living like cooking and buying a chop and things
like that, I find alien to me. But this time out, I’m trying to spend my time
out altogether, and not go back.”

Do you mind me asking how your personal ‘madness’
started?

“It’s a chemical thing.”

Beiles considers being outcast in ‘The
Conspiracy,’ and for him the boundaries become hazy under examination:

Monday, April 13, 2015

Dye Hard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair
Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the
first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so
much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his
association with the Beats. He collaborated on Minutes to Go with
William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso, and helped to shepherd
Burroughs’ manuscript of Naked Lunch into print at the Paris-based
Olympia Press, where he worked as an editor. “Best known” is a questionable
term, though. If he was known at all, it was only among a certain segment of
avant-garde expatriate writers and artists living in Tangier, Paris, London,
Rotterdam, Athens, and other far-flung places, where he spent many years
scraping by in various capacities....Read more

Who was Sinclair Beiles?

Who was Sinclair Beiles? is a compilation of writings about South African Beat poet Sinclair Beiles, co-edited by Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska. Contributors are Gary Cummiskey, Eva Kowalska, Alan Finlay, George Dillon Slater, dawie malan and Fred de Vries. Published by Dye Hard Press, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2009. Who was Sinclair Beiles? is distributed to bookstores throughout South Africa by Bacchus Books.However, copies can be ordered directly from the publisher.Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com for order details.